2 November 2011

Sorry seems to be the hardest word - special request for Cllr Thomas

Do you remember that Mr Mustard got something wrong and it was picked up by Cllr Rawlings. He wasn't home at the time but within 24 hours Mr Mustard had posted a correction and issued an apology. It is not difficult and you feel better for it unless you are the deputy leader apparently.

Let Mr Mustard start at the beginning.

He was in Portugal going round and round the racetrack in Portimao for 3 days when word reached him, via the bloggers early warning system that he was being maligned in the press, here is a link to one of the articles. He was also receiving emails and phone calls about this.

So in the evening instead of having a beer with his mates in the bar Mr Mustard had to get his laptop out and defend himself.

Once he was back Mr Mustard decided to get to the bottom of the supposed £40,000 figure. He wrote to Cllr Thomas as follows on 6 October

I believe that you were referring to my requests although I can't agree the number of 175 without further enquiry.

I do not believe that my requests can possibly have an average cost of £225 being 9 hours work at £25

Below is a typical request and response.

27 September 2011

Dear Mr Mustard

I am writing regarding your request, received by the London Borough of Barnet (the Council) on30 August 2011 for access to the following information:

“Please provide the cost of hall hire for the Finchley & Golders Green Residents' forums on the following occasions:-

5 January 2011

9 March 2011

23 June 2011

14 September 2011

Please provide the cost of hall hire for the Chipping Barnet Residents' forums on the following occasions:-

17 January 2011

22 February 2011

23 June 2011

20 September 2011

Please provide the cost of hall hire for the Hendon Residents' forums on the following occasions:-

18 January 2011

15 March 2011

23 June 2011

12 September 2011

If any of these meetings are followed by an environment sub-committee please provide the total cost of hall hire for that evening ( i.e. you do not need to split the cost of hall hire across the two meetings but just state the total fee due or paid for that evening ).”

We are processing your request under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 (the FOIA). My response to your request is below.

Response

I can confirm the following:

The cost of hall hire for theFinchley & Golders Green Residents' forums on the following occasions -

5 January 2011 - Avenue House - £180.00.

9 March 2011 - St Michael’s Church Hall - £50.00

23 June 2011 - Greek Cypriot Neighbourhood Centre - £120.00

14 September 2011 - Trinity Church Centre - £106.00

The cost of hall hire for the Chipping Barnet Residents’ forums on the following occasions -

17 January 2011 - East Barnet School - £105.00

22 February 2011 - Chipping Barnet Library - £168.00

23 June 2011 - Coppetts Wood School - £247.50

20 September 2011 - All Saints Art Centre - £30.00

The cost of hall hire for the Hendon Residents' forums on the following occasions -

18 January 2011 - Sangam Centre - £175.00

15 March 2011 - Barnet Multicultural Centre - £100.00

23 June 2011 - Sangam Centre - £200.00

12 September 2011 - Copthall School - £420.00

Your Rights

If you are unhappy with the way your request for information has been handled, you can request a review by writing to the FOI Officer at: The London Borough of Barnet, North London Business Park, Oakleigh Road South, London, N11 1NP (email foi@barnet.gov.uk).

If you remain dissatisfied with the handling of your request or complaint, you have a right to appeal to the Information Commissioner at: The Information Commissioner's Office, Wycliffe House, Water Lane, Wilmslow, Cheshire, SK9 5AF (telephone: 08456 30 60 60 or 01625 54 57 45; website: www.ico.gov.uk).

Let me first of all observe that this simple request took exactly 20 working days to answer. The Information Commissioner says that answers should be sent promptly. The 20 working days are the maximum time that a response should take. Barnet Council treat the 20 days as a target to hit, not one to beat.

I think that to answer the above question/s about hall hire would be about 15 minutes work at most. Do you agree?

Firstly, I need to know if you counted the above request as 1, 3, 4 or 12 questions ?

Secondly, as you have used an average of 9 hours for a response time in order to arrive at your figure of £225 then, given that many questions were much quicker to answer than that, some must have taken more than 9 hours to answer. Please tell me which questions did take more than 9 hours to answer.

Please provide a list of all my 175 questions so that I can check them.

publicservice.co.uk implies that I should not have submitted so many requests because of the administrative burden it places on the council.

Do you think that I have done anything wrong ?

Yours sincerely

Mr Mustard

Now the council's standard for answering correspondence is 10 working days. Having blabbed to the papers you would think that Cllr Thomas would be keen to reply as it's obviously an important manner. Not so, Mr Mustard had to nudge him on 27 October to reply. A reply did come on Sunday 30 October, as follows in sea-sick blue (teal!) and further comment by Mr Mustard in red

I think that to answer the above question/s about hall hire would be about 15 minutes work at most. Do you agree?

The information you requested does appear basic enough to obtain quickly however there will be factors I'm not aware of such as the number of records/invoices to search (the Council deals with many property matters) and officer prioritisation of workload/more urgent matters.

That's a yes then. 15 minutes work. I also don't have any idea about the council's procedures.

Firstly, I need to know if you counted the above request as 1, 3, 4 or 12 questions ?

The questions regarding hall hire were treated as one request as demonstrated in the list attached.

Fair enough.

Secondly, as you have used an average of 9 hours for a response time in order to arrive at your figure of £225 then, given that many questions were much quicker to answer than that, some must have taken more than 9 hours to answer. Please tell me which questions did take more than 9 hours to answer.We do not keep a record of the amount of time spent dealing with a request. The 'typical cost' figure of £225 is derived from research into the costs of FoI requests carried out by UCL.

No question, or set of, took 9 hours to answer so no question cost £225 to answer.

Please provide a list of all my 175 questions so that I can check them.See attached list.

Mr Mustard isn't going to burden you with the list but he did ask the 175 questions. Even though Mr Mustard numbers his requests in order the council didn't quote those numbers or get the list in the same date order.

It is a legal duty of the council to respond to Freedom of Information requests. I accept that I have sent in quite a few. That is necessary because the council is not open and transparent enough for my liking and the website is difficult to navigate. The response that you made, as reported by publicservice.co.uk implies that I should not have submitted so many requests because of the administrative burden it places on the council.

Do you think that I have done anything wrong ?

Members of the public are entitled to request information and I, of course, do not see anything wrong with that. I also see nothing wrong in publicising the costs of responding to such requests in the interests of transparency.

No! Good, you can expect many more requests when Mr Mustard has the free time. Please make sure that you don't identify Mr Mustard in the future.

The more information the Council can publish on a standard basis the less need there will be for FoI requests. This Council was one of the first to publish spending on items over £500. I gather in June you were invited to suggest areas to be added to our publication scheme but officers have not yet received a response.

Please see the previous blog post on this subject.

Mr Mustard felt that he & the situation had been misrepresented and so he emailed Cllr. Thomas today as follows :-

Dear Councillor Thomas

Thank you for your email of 30 October 2011 from which it is apparent that you simply cannot support the following made to www.publicservice.co.uk

"Thomas said one of the bloggers had submitted a total of 175 FoI requests between April and September of 2011. This meant a total nearing £40,000 was spent by the council responding to this one individual, based on a typical cost of £225 in dealing with each request"

Now I may have submitted 175 requests as per your attached list but the council hasn't answered 175. I have added a notes column. There are 9 that have been aggregated for cost purposes and then refused. The total cost to answer the 9 requests, counted as 140 line items, was estimated to be £1,400 which would make each individual line item £10 to answer if they had been answered ( and your £40,000 estimate was overstated by 9 * £225 = £2,205 ) .

2 questions were only answered today and so were late, as is often the case. At the time that you made your statement they had not cost the council anything to answer.

3 questions have been refused. ( £675 of your estimate not spent )

7 await an answer and are late. ( £1,575 of your estimate not spent )

I have not looked in detail at every line, I have just annotated the questions which sprang readily to mind.

There is no evidence that the typical cost of answering my requests is anything like £225 although there is evidence from the council itself that it isn't a typical cost.

In summary, both the number of items and the cost estimate are wrong and you should now issue a correction to www.publicservice.co.uk

Yours sincerely

Mr Mustard

Did this prompt an apology. No. This response arrived 17 minutes later and from this you can gather that the question of an apology has been given insufficient consideration.

Dear Mr Mustard,

Thank you for your observations and assumptions.

I disagree that requests not yet answered or where answers were refused have cost the Council 'nothing'. Requests currently worked on or refused still receive officer time.

Thank you for your feedback.

Regards,

Cllr Daniel Thomas

This reply talks about feedback. Mr Mustard did not give feedback. He asked for a correction to be sent to www.publicservice.co.uk - It has not been forthcoming. Mr Mustard has been misrepresented in the press and thinks the councillor is being churlish in his failure to acknowledge that the requests made did not cost anything like the £40,000 he stated without any substantiation whatsoever.

This standard of behaviour is below the one that we should receive from councillors, especially one who is the deputy leader.

1 comment:

Many councils baulk at the cost of responding to FOI requests, usually those with something to hide. Many also artificially inflate the response costs in an attempt to wrongly persuade others that FOI is too costly for councils to comply with. The law is the law, do councils baulk at the cost of complying with other laws?

My council is just the same, whilst artificially inflating the cost of FOI responses so they can baulk at the cost they magically produce in house videos for nothing..